


Bound Together (Like a Married Couple)

by NorthwesternInsanity



Category: Dokken, Music RPF
Genre: Delirious rambles, Fever, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mild Angst, Nightmares, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-30 00:23:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13938627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorthwesternInsanity/pseuds/NorthwesternInsanity
Summary: It's been a month of hell on tour, and inevitably, Don is sick. Mick takes care of him, and gets an unexpected and unusual confession as to what his unconditional caring means to Don when tensions within are overbearing.





	Bound Together (Like a Married Couple)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Malivrag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malivrag/gifts).



> Backed up from Rockfic's 2017 Ficmas; this prompt was a fill for Malivrag with Mick Brown taking soup to a sick Don Dokken, who goes into a feverish ramble as to why he and Mick should get married. Title taken as a reference to the Dream Warriors lyrics.

Mick groaned as the hotel elevator, which had taken almost two minutes to get to him, opened to reveal a large family crammed in with suitcases, and virtually no room for him to fit in. He waved them along, indicating he wasn't even going to try catching this one down.

_Fuck the elevator_ , Mick decided when another hadn't come in another minute. He'd take the four flights of stairs down to the lobby from the fifth floor. The joy of big cities where the most easily accessible hotels were in high rise towers. By the time he got down to the bottom after jogging down the twist and turns of two landings between every floor to fit the stairs into as tight a corner of the building as possible, Mick's head was practically spinning.

He was rushing to get to Jeff and George, who were waiting for him. This was one of the few days they got -even more sporadic over the last month -where they didn't have a show in the night and could spend the day doing whatever they wanted without a rush. Ironic considering Mick was now hurrying to keep them from waiting any longer. But the hectic month was taking its toll, and all he wanted was to get out and hang around town with his bandmates without any time conflicts -and hopefully without any drama either so he could enjoy it.

"There you are," said George as Mick got to the front doors of the lobby where he and Jeff were waiting. "What took so long; Jeff and I were contemplating sending staff to check and see that no one had stolen off with you."

George's facetious remark was questionable, but Jeff was nearly hopping from foot to foot, and Mick hadn't exactly gotten down quickly.

"Hey, I didn't count on the elevator being slow as molasses and arriving packed to the gills, or I'd have bailed to the stairs sooner."

"And I see Don's even worse, since he's still not here and you are." George said it this time less playfully and more irritated.

"Is he coming?" asked Jeff.

"No." Mick couldn't keep a slight level of concern out of his voice. "I tried to get him, but you know how he said he wasn't feeling well last night and wanted to go right to bed as soon as we got to the hotel?"

"Yeah?" George crossed his arms.

"Well, he's sick -probably with the same crud I got last week. Said he woke up a few hours ago, and it's only worse now. He wasn't exactly too keen on coming to his door to tell me, so he's saying he's not coming with us."

Jeff surreptitiously exchanged a silent look of concern with Mick and George; some out of concern as to whether Don was okay, but most of it appearing as cocaine-tinged paranoia. With or without the paranoia though, Mick could understand it, silently sending back an agreeing look of concern to Jeff. It was no secret that Don's already eccentric mood could get a little more testy when he was sick. It wasn't to say that nobody else was like that. Even Jeff's emotions could become unpredictable when he was sick enough. Don's just tended to be of a less pleasant spectrum. Sometimes he was just more aloof than usual and he wanted to be left alone, usually he just became slightly more dramatic and more prone to arguing with others, but sometimes he could get downright scary if he really felt bad, and if he didn't even want to come down from his room, things weren't looking great.

George was a little less subtle, knowing what it could mean tomorrow if Don was still struck down.

"Oh, _great_ ," he grumbled. "He's already been in rare form, and now he's gonna be cranky because he's sick too..."

Mick sighed heavily, reached up, and scrubbed his hands over his face. Not again. Not now. Not with how things had been the last few weeks with the fighting.

"Mick?" Jeff's face fell into that doe-eyed, pensive, sad gaze that could melt anyone's heart in an instant. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. Forget it. Let's just get going."

But the whole afternoon and early evening while they were out and about, and after arriving back, he couldn't stop thinking about it. When Don hadn't emerged later into the evening, Mick found himself on a mission to check up on him after a quick trip to the cafe down the street before it closed for the night.

He approached Don's room with a plastic shopping bag in one hand, and two keys in his other -his own room key, and the spare room key for Don's room that he was holding.

Even though Don was in the room, Mick had a feeling he was going to need that spare key. It was one of those instinctive ones where he knew nothing about what Don was currently up to to prove it, but he just knew he would.

"Hey, Don?" He rapped his knuckles against the door. "Don, come on and open the door. It's just me here, nobody else. You know I'm not gonna bother you."

Mick paused and grinned mischievously to himself. "Well, maybe a little, but not more than you can handle. So open up."

There was no sound from inside, even after he pressed his ear to the door and knocked again to give fair warning, so Mick finally took the spare key and opened the door on his own.

He set the bag and its contents down on the counter by the door and just outside the bathroom and a small suite area with a table and a couch, then went around the room divider to investigate.

He found Don curled up on his side on the bed, robe thrown on over his clothes -which he'd put on a few hours before Mick had seen him when he'd still been debating going along. He'd even neglected to take his shoes off. Every few seconds he made pitiful attempts at sniffles through blocked sinuses, before gulping for air through his mouth.

"It's... 's too ...much," he murmured in weak, broken syllables, eyelids fluttering while closed, his fingers twitching from where he hugged his arms across his chest. "Too much... 'er all tryin'... Want me t'go 'way..."

"Don?" Mick sat down in the edge of the bed and placed his hand on Don's arm, shaking him. "Don, you with me-?"

Don gasped, flinching and opening his eyes before murmuring groggily, though somewhat more coherent.

"Where'd you come from?! ...Oh, not you too. Oh-no... This is too much-"

"Wake up, Don. You were dreaming." Mick pulled Don over into his back and helped him sit up, leaning so that his eyes were a mere foot from Don's glazed over ones and staring right into them. "It's just me. I don't know who you were talking to, but they're not here."

"Mick?" Don whimpered, flopping forward and resting his cheek on his shoulder as if his head weighed too much to hold up.

"Yes," whispered Mick. "Just me; right here. ...Whew!" He blew out a sigh, starting to feel uncomfortably warm. It didn't feel like a terrible fever, but he knew Don's temperature was higher than it should have been for the brief contact before Don pulled away and propped himself up in a sitting position on the bed by tripodding on his arms, muttering something indecipherable.

"Must have been some weird dream," Mick declared.

"Yeah, sort of."

"What happened in it?" Mick began to get a little curious.

Don held up a hand, lowered his chin so his gaze dropped to the floor, and shook his head. His eyes became too glassy to be from just having woken up while sick, and his next words were barely audible.

"I don't want to talk about it."

Mick winced. _Oh, shit, he's gonna get weepy if I don't distract him._ He wasn't sure if it would have been better to know, but decided then that he didn't want to if it was threatening to pull tears out of Don when he wasn't in complete privacy -which usually wasn't something that happened. Mick wasn't one to deal well with heavy emotions anyway, and he didn't want Don to end up embarrassed later if he wouldn't be already just from how sick and vulnerable he was.

"Okay, then we're not going to. You're here with me and not there, alright? I've got ya, and we can focus on anything else."

Don sat up, still leaning over like his head was too heavy to hold up. 

"For one, it's a good thing we weren't scheduled to go on tonight," he spoke, matter-of-factly.

Mick snorted. "No shit. One instance of good timing in this tour -for once! Hey, hold on a second." He got up, went around the room divider and from the bag he'd set down on the counter, retrieved a container of soup and a spoon, deciding that if Don was sitting up, he would be willing to sit up without much trouble.

"What's that noise?" Don murmured, leaning back on his pillows and covering his face with his arm. He heard the sound of the plastic bag rustling as Mick pulled out the contents.

"Nothing that you need to worry about. Come'ere and sit back up," said Mick, sitting back down and holding the container up. "I brought you some soup. I know you don't feel well and probably don't really feel like eating -'cause I know I didn't, but you haven't all day, and you're body's pulling energy running a fever. You need to eat something, or you're gonna feel weak traveling tomorrow. At least it's warm and might help get you unstuffed."

Don just stared blankly and blinked as if the words hadn't registered.

_How high is that fever? Really..._

"We should go to the couch and use the table. So nothing gets spilled."

_Well, he can't be too far out of his senses if he's thinking that way._ Maybe it wasn't the fever and just the grips of that mystery dream still pulling on him that initially delayed his reaction. At least Mick was going to hope that was the case, and go with it as long as he didn't see anything to say otherwise.

Don sat down and leaned over the table, propped on his arms. He sluggishly stirred the bowl for a few seconds before sampling a spoonful, as if having to contemplate whether he had the energy to eat.

Mick stood awkwardly by the couch, not knowing where else to go. He didn't want to stay standing over Don's shoulder while he ate, which was kind of invasive, and would be the thing to trigger Don to get moody, especially now. But the couch was small, and he'd end up in pretty close to Don. Don was less likely to snap about having space to himself if Mick was on the couch, but that was also hard to tell when Don was sick and out of it.

_Screw it,_ Mick decided. Sitting on the couch was the lesser of the two evils in that department, and having had the same crud less than a week ago, the chances of it getting past his immune system now were pretty low. He lowered himself down on the couch next to Don, who was now digging in at a more eager pace now that his sickness-suppressed appetite had been stimulated. Knowing how he'd felt, Mick imagined Don hadn't even realized he was hungry -because he certainly hadn't been. 

He sat back in silence for a few minutes until Don's appetite began to run ashore. Finally, Don sighed deeply, pushed back from the table with a portion of soup still left in the bowl, and leaned back on the couch. He rested his head on Mick's shoulder.

"Tired?" asked Mick.

"Uh-huh." It almost looked as though Don was in pain summoning the energy to eek it out.

"It's been a busy string of locations, the past few stops," Mick admitted. "I thought you were going to make it, but that probably did you in. I'm sorry."

Don snuffled with congestion. "I'd've gotten it anyway."

Mick decided to stop Don before he got going down a path of grumpy talking, which was a possibility with where his remark was aiming, and that would lead to his mood following. He pointed to the remaining soup in the bowl.

"Eat," he ordered. "Finish it before it gets cold. It's not gonna do you much good then."

Don was sluggish sitting back up and didn't look thrilled to get off of Mick's shoulder, but he obliged, staying propped on one elbow leaning over the table and the bowl until he was finished. As soon as he did finish, he went right back to his prior position -laid back on the couch and leaning on Mick.

"I love you," Don murmured exhaustedly.

"You know I do too," Mick sighed. He felt kind of sad saying it, considering he'd barely talked to Don the past few weeks aside from backstage and in passing on the bus.

It had been an intense few weeks -one of those spans where even when he and Don got along plenty well, Don ended up isolated anyway because he and George were in one of their phases where their typical tendency to argue had peaked to where they could hardly be in the same room without some level of going back and forth. The rush on the schedule wasn't helping. Playing nine nights at a time back to back was a sure fire way to tire even the most energetic out, and tweak tempers. Stressed out with the arguing and the craziness, Jeff was putting almost twice the amount of cocaine up his nose than he did on the average day, which rendered him paranoid of everything, especially of Don's moods, and practically glued to George's side whenever he and Don got going. And sometimes when that happened, it was just easier for everyone if Mick left Don alone rather than trying to reason with him when he was upset, and to just hang with Jeff and George so that they wouldn't get the idea he was against them.

"It's almost as though we're a married couple," Don muttered.

Mick grinned. "Yeah, like the couple that has arguments over minor things and still ends up laying back at the end of the day with each other."

"Practically live with each other too."

"That too."

"It's almost like we should be married," Don murmured. "If it weren't for the stigma and having to deal with the idiots in the world drawing connections where they aren't... I wish we could."

Mick nearly choked on something he'd been unaware of. Either air, or his own saliva, probably. Not because he was horrified -just taken by surprise and thoroughly amused.

"What makes you say that?" he asked, swallowing hard to keep from breaking out in laughing and coughing at the same time.

"'Cause we love each other, live with each other, and it's not like we're incompatible, y'know?"

"How so?" asked Mick, just curious to see what Don would say. It didn't have to be told to anyone else if it was some crazed, delirious ramble that didn't make any sense.

"Could live together the rest of our lives and spend as much time on the road as you like -because we both want to do it. I don't wanna necessarily go onstage every single night, but I'm not much for settling down either."

Mick bit his lip and held in his laughter. He didn't know how with it and out of it Don was, and he was trying not to make too much fun of him when he possibly didn't know what he was saying.

"We can always go on tour at any time, Don. You know I'm always up for it and you'd just have to keep me in the loop of what you wanted to do."

"...And neither of us would have to worry about making life on the road match up with life at home and its ideals, since we both want to stay on the road," Don murmured.

"Well, that is one thing," Mick snorted, unable to deny it, and not able to feel abashed at just wanting to have a good time uninhibited -which was asking far more than any partner's share of patience and understanding. "That is true."

"We get how it goes backstage, so we wouldn't have to worry about making excuses to each other... and any time at home, we'd be right there if we had ideas to write."

"We have camped out a few nights," Mick admitted, though he and Don definitely hadn't camped out as many nights at each other's houses for writing as much as Jeff had camped out at George's.

"...the other stuff we like too. We could take our motorcycles out together at any time we wanted without having to phone back and forth to see who was home..." Don continued.

"Okay." 

"You've said you like cats. You could have them. I'm neutral on them. But they'd have to learn to be okay with me having dogs, because dogs are the best, and I'll always have a dog."

Mick snorted, feeling his cheeks starting to get sore from holding laughter back. He brushed Don's hair aside and felt his cheek against his forehead again. Still running a fever. It didn't seem as high as before, but if it was any lower, it definitely hadn't changed much. Maybe Don was more delirious than he thought.

He seemed to have enough sense, however, to take Mick's cheek-contact as an invitation to go from leaning to outright snuggling into Mick.

"You always look out for me when nobody else gives a fuck, Mick," Don murmured weakly.

Maybe he was just getting sleepy on top of the delirium now that he was warmed up and settled down from whatever it was that had him all strung out.

"Don, I think you need to lie down, close your eyes, and go the fuck to sleep, okay?"

"I can't do it," Don murmured, which looked pretty ridiculous when his eyelids were drooping and he was clearly struggling to hold them open.

"What do you mean, you can't do it?" asked Mick. "You're practically falling asleep right here."

"Can't go back with them. They'll make me leave. It's too much. I can't do it."

"Don," said Mick, a hint of a chuckle that was more of concern than amusement catching his voice, "yes; you can. Let's get you back in bed now." He stood up, pulling Don up with him.

"I can't do it. I need to stay with you, Mick -I can't do it."

Mick guided Don back to the bed and peeled back the covers. "Don't be silly. You can," he repeated, encouraging Don to take his robe off and get under the covers instead so he could be warm and not as restrained from stretching out. He decided that the shoes could stay on Don's feet for the night, or until Don semi-consciously kicked them off. He wasn't going to potentially fight him over that.

"Can you stay?" asked Don, reaching up and flicking his hand around aimlessly, trying to grab hold of Mick's arm.

Mick sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed again.

"I can stay with you for a little while while you fall asleep. I can't stay all night though. It's too early for me anyway."

"You're not ever gonna leave me, are you Mick?" asked Don.

"I'm leaving you in this room for tonight, but I'm gonna be right next door, or at the furthest down the hall with the crew. And I'll come back later to check on you. I can even set an alarm a few hours into the night -does that sound okay?"

"Not like that. I mean as in _leave_ me."

"What do you mean by that then?"

"You're not ever going to leave me... As in disappear. Like leave the band and me, and never come back, or never speak to me again, or-"

Mick sighed. With the way things were looking, he had a feeling even if he didn't leave the band, George would for sure, and Jeff would follow him. It was really getting messy, and it was something Mick didn't want to think about either.

"I can't promise anything, Don. I can say that I don't want to leave, and I'm not looking forward to it if I ever have to."

"Would you come back?"

"Don, let's not talk about this kind of stuff, please," Mick begged. "It's no fun, and you're getting yourself worked up too. Can't be making you feel any better. I'm here now, and I promise I'll come back in a few hours, okay?"

Trying to comfort him, Mick gently smoothed Don's hair with his fingertips. As soon as he did, Don struggled to sit up and flopped forward to lean himself on Mick, same as he had after waking up, but this time, he held on with his arms.

Mick briefly bear-hugged Don, then let go, waiting for Don to release his hold on him. It wasn't until a couple of minutes later as he was beginning to wonder if he'd have to pull Don off of himself that fatigue took its toll on his grip.

"You need to sleep." Mick settled Don back down on the pillows. His eyes were closed and he was listless, probably unaware of his now-monotonous repeating.

"I can't do it," Don murmured.

"Don, you can."

"I can't do it... I can't do it..." The pace of his repetitions were getting progressively slower with exhaustion.

Mick shook his head, unable to suppress the laughter this time. Don was just too out of it by this point. Instead of continuing to insist otherwise, he rubbed his shoulder to lull him off faster.

"It's okay, Don."

"I can't do it... I can't... do..."

Silence.

Deep, slow, congested breathing.

"Didn't I tell ya you could?" Mick whispered playfully in the dark by the bed, illuminated only by the cast of light from the other side of the room divider by the couch, and the green glow of digits on the alarm clock topping the night stand, reading 10:30.

He stood up, being very cautious not to rattle the bed and wake Don up, pulled the blankets up where he'd been sitting and had pulled them over some, and made sure that Don was covered well.

Then, he trotted out of the room and closed the door softly behind him without a sound.

Mick ended up hanging out with Jeff and George for another hour, and then making his way down the hall to hang out with the crew. There was never any mention of tension or arguments with them, just a bunch of fun. Mick always thought those guys needed them to hang out every now and then just to really know them and show appreciation for what they did, and he needed the positive environment too. The reality was, even having spent more time with Jeff and George than with Don the past few weeks, he hadn't spent much time with them either considering how often he was with the crew.

Finally, around 1:30 in the morning, Mick made his way back to his room opting to attempt at going to bed early before setting off on another extra long string of consecutive event nights. Attempt was the key operator. He found himself lying awake, thinking about the jumble of different subjects Don had gone through, and his strange ramblings before and right after waking up. Even though Mick knew 10:30 would have been far too early for him to have settled in for the night, part of him wished he'd just brought his stuff into Don's room and stayed there for the night. Maybe the hotel wouldn't have been pleased with him abandoning a single-occupancy room and cramming two people into another single-occupancy, but the rules were the least of Mick's concern. Catching it wasn't even a worry for him when he'd just been sick with the same thing.

An hour and a half later, still lying awake, he decided it had been long enough. He got up and exited his room, quietly keying into Don's without knocking. He decided it was better to have Don mildly frightened at first by the door opening if he was sleeping lightly than to wake him up if he was sleeping well.

Turning on the lamp beside the bed, Mick found Don curled up asleep on his side again. 

This time he was tightly hugging a pillow to his chest in a way that looked like he was desperate for comfort and trying to get it from whatever he could grab. The bed was discombobulated in a way that suggested he'd been restless and fitful in his sleep at some point of the night. The blankets and sheets were untucked on one lower corner of the mattress from being yanked up and wrestled around, and the blankets stopped just before meeting the edge of that side of the bed. On the other side, the blankets were pulled over to hang further than they should have off the edge, and from the portion covering Don, he was somewhat cocooned in it with the pillow.

One foot stuck out from the bottom of the blanket, shoe still on. His other shoe was on the floor, probably having been kicked off when he was shifting around. Don's hair stuck to the sides of his neck, incredibly messy, and his breathing came in audible, wheezy noises with tiny gasps in between to compensate for the congestion.

Mick went around the bed to the side that had been untucked and pulled the blankets back down and over as much as he could without shaking Don around too much, or pulling his cocoon away. He opted not to tuck it back for that reason, but it was better than before. Heading back around the bed, he then went to try and gauge if Don's fever had changed significantly.

First he placed the back of his hand to Don's forehead. It felt cooler. Or at least he thought. He was still pretty warm, but it felt less like the warmth of a fever than it did just normal body heat radiating from being cocooned. Trying to see if he could get a slightly more accurate idea, Mick started to lean down to feel against his cheek again.

He stopped short, holding his breath for a moment when he got down at the right angle and saw the lamp light catch on the sticky, salty tracks that ran down Don's cheeks from his eyes. 

Mick could have sworn his heart sank. It was bad enough when he saw those tracks on Jeff, or with the very rare occasion of a night rough enough that he saw them on George. But there was something that always jolted in Mick's chest when he could see them on Don.

Slowly releasing an exhale, Mick stood up and padded into the bathroom, getting a washcloth from the towel rack and wetting it with cool water in the sink. Folding the washcloth over the tip of his extended index finger, he returned back to the bed and gently wiped the half-dried tear tracks from Don's face.

Don flinched and pulled the pillow in even tighter against himself, if that was possible. His eyes fluttered open, still ever so slightly rimmed in red. 

"Whoa, what...?" he moaned, still in the clutches of sleep.

"Quiet," Mick whispered, setting the cloth down on the night stand beside the bed. "Everything's alright."

"Mick?" Don's voice was muffled by the top edge of the extra pillow. He must have realized it, because he lifted his head from the other and strained to keep holding up whilst laying down flat.

"Yeah, I'm here."

"Why, Mick?" Don squinted. His eyes seemed less glazed over from earlier, more like his normal self, and confused as to why Mick was there almost like the encounter earlier hadn't happened.

"I came back to check on you. I was in here with you a few hours ago, and you were feeling pretty rough and running a fever. Besides, you asked if I could come back a little later."

Don put his head back down exhaustedly as his squint softened to a blank, bewildered stare. Mick almost chuckled at how pitiful he looked for just a sinus virus, but it wasn't unlike Don to appear dramatic, and this was no exception.

Albeit his confusion was somewhat endearing.

"I did?"

"Yeah, you did," Mick confirmed. "I came back like you wanted. How you feeling?" 

"Fantastic aside from being sick." That at least sounded the more typical, sarcastic Don showing through. He sniffled -or attempted too, being too congested to get much of an inhale through his nose.

Mick reached him the tissue box from the night stand, preparing to exit quickly if what seemed at first like typical sarcastic Don was really still feeling out of it and about to turn surly and demand to be left alone.

"Here. This."

Don snatched a white sheet from the box and tried to lean over the side of the bed. He had to push his spare pillow aside first. As soon as he got around it, he folded the tissue and blew his nose, promptly launching into a fit of coughing that left him dry-gagging as he did. Then he examined his fingertips and grimaced. Folding the tissue over hadn't been enough to save him on this one.

"Nice," said Mick sarcastically.

"Ugh, gross," Don groaned, cringing again. He slung his leg over the side of the bed and hoisted himself up, staggering off to the bathroom.

Mick took the opportunity to fix the bed up properly. He went to the closet for the spare pillow and swapped out the sweat-dampened one on the bed for one that was cool and dry, tossing the other onto the floor beside the bed out of the way. He had it set back up just as Don came back and crawled right back in.

"Are you feeling any better at least, from earlier?" asked Mick. He was hoping. He'd only felt sick for three days, and only two of those had been particularly bad. Don was likely to take longer to recover, but with an off day, there was a chance.

I think. The next string might rebound it on me though." Don paused and looked up. "Mick, I know this is probably gonna sound a little weird... But, could you stay in this room? I don't know why -I'm not scared of being alone in here or anything, but I just don't want to, you know?"

Mick nodded. "I'll stay in here. Heck, right here with you if you'd like it."

The half pleading, half relieved look told Mick all he needed. He walked around to the other side of the bed and lowered himself down, scooting in enough so that he wasn't on the edge of the bed, but also to leave a small gap between them until Don chose to close it. He still wasn't taking a chance on a potentially volatile outburst.

It wasn't long before that happened. Don scooted in against Mick, huddling against him for warmth.

Their lips brushed together. There was a moment of collective startle, but Don didn't push away, so Mick figured he wasn't going to get in a strange mood over it. Mick's lips were soft and soothing against Don's sore and chapped ones, and he hadn't minded it -only concerned that it didn't weird Mick out. But neither were, so they continued to hold together. By the way that Mick felt his cheeks flush, he was sure he'd have been turned on had it not been for just how miserable he knew Don was from experience. 

They were just starting to brush their lips together again to push in for an attempt at a kiss. But then Don let go and snatched himself up off of Mick, turning away as a fierce coughing jag launched its attack on him and ended their moment together prematurely.

"Damn it," Don forced out between coughs after a few intense seconds.

Mick chuckled wistfully. "Bless your heart." He reached over and rubbed Don's back to soothe him until the rest of it subsided and he lay back down. Or flopped back down, exhausted.

"Mick?"

"Yeah, what is it, Don?"

"Mick, I had this strange dream, and I can't remember too much of it -it kept coming in disconnected segments. I just remember people leaving, and telling me I had to stay far away and never come back, and..."

That made sense. That had to be why Don was asking if he'd leave, and all the anxiety earlier on. And why he'd shed tears in his sleep. All the result of the recent hectic schedule -screw this leg of the tour; Mick was going to be glad to see it over in two weeks.

"...it's not like I wouldn't be alright if that happened, but it was like they were putting it on me, and-"

"Well, if I wake up and think you're having another one -if you're sleep-talking or twitching around -I'll wake you up from it, okay?" offered Mick. "If I can't get you to wake up all the way, I'll at least poke your conscious enough to break you out of it."

Don slid back to where he'd been prior to the coughing fit. He curled up lower than the pillow and rested his cheek against Mick's chest. Mick had noticed in all the times he and Don had ended up sharing a bed and not tried to keep to opposite sides, he tended to take that position every time. He hadn't been able to figure out why, but as long as it wasn't excessively hot where they were, the warmth from it was undeniably cozy and helped to lull him off.

Don liked it because as soon as they both lay still and quiet, he could hear Mick's heart beat faintly -a strong, steady rhythm much like what he gave the band, and between that and the warm proximity, he felt safe.

"Are you going to leave, Mick?" he murmured.

"I'm staying right here." Mick lay his palm on Don's shoulder blade, holding him against his side and feeling him relax as he drifted off.

Maybe they already were married in theory. But Mick didn't need a fancy term to have a connection to Don -it seemed that, like the nightmares, were just an illusion to highlight things -good and bad -that already existed.

"I can't speak for the others, and I can't promise I'll always be with you, but I'm not ever gonna leave and not come back."


End file.
